Hello! My weird little quest to become an actual super woman continues apace: 3 runs a week, 2/3 bike rides a week, kayaking, and walking. I have so many bruises, a couple of nice scrapes on both elbows from falling off bikes, and I have discovered muscles I didn’t even know I had.

Yesterday I went full bonkers and decided on a whim that after two weeks of running, I could do a Parkrun. I did it - 5km of running and walking, at my own pace, on a stupidly hot day, and while it’s not really about the time… I didn’t come last!

I feel good because I can tell I am improving every day and so there’s a sense of accomplishment as well as the rush of endorphins, but I also sort of feel like I’ve been hit by a bus. Is this what normal people feel like all the time? My God.

This is a good piece about river water quality which is quite worrying. I’ve been kayaking on the river I live on, and I accidentally swallowed loads of water while capsizing the other week, so I feel *great* about the fact that “there is no river in the UK that is safe to be swimming in”. Juuuuust great.

I quite liked this read. I have long wanted to write a piece about how the housing crisis is not an issue of supply, but people have been reluctant to share their data with me. I have done loads of research into it so I KNOW he’s right. I just can’t nail it down. ARGH. (H/T Gavin Freeguard)

The link in this thread doesn’t work for me (to do with being outside the US?), but USA Today appears to have done an interactive piece on the history of slavery. I obviously don’t know if it’s good or not, but it’s interesting enough for me to WANT to read it.

The Houston Chronicle is keeping track of the hundreds of people who have been killed in Harris County this year, adding them to a map and writing biographies about each of them alongside their photos. While this doesn’t seem like a data journalism story, it’s one of those which takes dedication to verifying details and finding out about people’s lives.

Just a few questions and the NYT can tell you which way you’re likely to vote. To my relief, I got Democratic, with the only thing making me more likely to vote Republican being the fact I’m white. YIKES.

I absolutely loved this analysis of presidential campaign rally playlists. The NYT looked at every aspect of the songs - lyrics, genre, who was singing - to see what that might say about the candidates. Kirsten Gillibrand has Le Tigre on her playlist and by far the most female artists, for instance. Turn your sound ON and have a read.

Quartz looks at song titles from Spotify and whether they are all-lowercase (like “thank u, next” by Ariana Grande) or all-uppercase (like Travis Scott, though I’m so old I don’t know who he is?). The MOST interesting thing about this is the conclusion that the cultural shift from proper case to lower or upper is because these artists have grown up in the era of texts, tweets, and snapchat.

Alberto Cairo wrote a nice and simple explainer on Scientific American which shows how you can easily misinterpret charts. Aside from “correlation is not causation”, I like this tip: “Consider whether the data represent the level required to make the inferences you want.”

You might need to use translations for this but this uses your Spotify account to compare you to others of your generation across a bunch of variables like popularity, energy, etc. It also gives you the age it thinks you are.

I’m Soph, and I’m a data journalist from London currently in Cardiff. I write Fair Warning because I am really nerdy about data and I love pretty data visualisations.

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A weekly newsletter with anywhere between 10 and 20 links about data journalism, data visualisation, and storytelling, curated by a British data journalist and nerd. Expect politics, statistics, society and culture - all through the frame of data... With a dash of whimsy.